Why we need a Holy Saturday-shaped faith
by Alison Brewis
Maybe you’ve heard of a cross-shaped faith, or a resurrection-shaped faith, but when did you last hear of a Holy Saturday-shaped faith?
Holy Saturday was a day where it looked like God was doing nothing. There’s very little in the gospel accounts that tells us what was happening between the cross and the resurrection. For the disciples, Saturday was a solemn sabbath. No doubt they gathered together, mourned, and discussed everything that had happened, that all of Jerusalem was talking about. But the disciples couldn’t see God at work. They couldn’t see that Jesus’s work was finished, that he had accomplished his sacrifice on the cross. They didn’t know he was proclaiming the victory achieved by his substitutionary death. For the disciples, it was a dark day, devoid of hope. But they had forgotten they had Jesus’s promises of resurrection to hold onto. They were called to live by faith, and not by sight.
Isn’t this the pattern of much of faith in the Bible? In Genesis, Abraham waited 25 years for God to fulfil the promise of a son. 25 years where Abraham was tempted to think God wasn’t working, and that he should take things into his own hands. Abraham looked at his and Sarah’s frail bodies, “as good as dead”, and against all hope, he believed God’s promises. Abraham and Sarah lived in the darkness of the gap between promise and fulfilment, and trusted that the God who made the promise was faithful.
In 1 Samuel 4, the Philistines captured the Ark of God and took it away from Israel. God’s glory had departed from Israel because of their disobedience and idolatry. For seven months, the Israelites had no idea what God was doing. We find out from the following chapters that God was glorifying himself in the Philistine country, but the Israelites didn’t know. As the Ark of God got passed around the Philistine land like a cursed hot potato, the Israelites were in the dark. What a shock it would have been for them to see two cows appearing over the brow of the hill, pulling the Ark behind them! God had been at work, though it wasn’t visible.
Job had to suffer many trials, not least the trial of his harmful helpers, Job’s “comforters”. He was not aware, as we are, of what was going on in the heavenly throne room. He sat through the pain and darkness, clinging onto faith, not sight.
In Acts 24-25, Paul was in prison for 2 years. He didn’t know the plans of the Jews to assassinate him, or God’s work through Festus to preserve him. It looked like Paul was merely a pawn in a game played by powerful groups. And all Paul could do was count the bricks on the wall of his cell. But God in his word draws back the curtain so we can see how he has worked in all these situations in unseen ways, so we will have faith as we wait for God’s final fulfilment of his plans.
Although we live after the cross, and have full forgiveness through Jesus’s death, we still have to live by faith and not by sight as we await the final fulfilment and renewal that Jesus’s return will inaugurate. God has drawn back the curtain of his throne room through his word, so we can see that he is working all things for the good of those who love him, for his purposes, to bring us to glory with him. Unlike the disciples, we already know the ending of the story, so we can have confidence as we wait.
God wants us to persevere with a Holy Saturday-shaped faith – a faith that waits patiently in the gap between promise and fulfilment. A faith that trusts that God is at work, even in the darkest day.
Alison was one of the guests on our recent Writing Greenhouse - a short term mentoring project to encourage and equip women to give writing a go.